Tuesday, September 29, 2009

David Clayton of Thomas More College has prepared another article for the NLM which we are pleased to present. Here is his abstract of the article, followed by the article itself.

Abstract

All creation gives praise to God. More precisely it directs our praises to Him. Through its beauty we naturally discern the thumbprint, so to speak, of the Creator and our spirits are moved to love the source of what we see. Christian cosmology is the reading of the order of nature as a symbolic language and the mathematical description of that order, assigning a symbolism to those numbers. This article describes how the Church Fathers, especially Augustine and Boethius, described the patterns and harmonies in creation as mathematical ideals and understood them to point to the divine, the ‘mind of the Creator’. They then become a set of principles that can guide us in all our activities and traditionally were the basis of all Christian culture. The perfect manifestation of the Divine Order is in the liturgy and through our participation in it we can conform to that order fully with God's grace – the Mass is a supernatural step into the heavenly order. These mathematical ideals, therefore, become a set of principles by which we can order all our activity liturgically and, through grace, create beauty that, in turn, directs the souls of others to heaven and to joy. Amongst modern writers, Pope Benedict XVI has drawn our attention to this often.

This is the first of a number of articles that describe these ideas and their application. In the present article the principles are outlined. In following articles I will describe in more detail the symbolism of each number, traditional ideas of proportion and harmony, and how they are applied in our everyday work. This is culture in the broadest sense of the word – work, education, leisure, arts, music - founded on the cult of the Mass and the whole liturgy.